New remote sensing techniques for solar and space weather

Space weather (the solar wind and coronal mass ejections (CMEs)) are observed routinely near the Sun by telescopes, and measured directly by spacecraft at Earth orbit days later. Space weather is a risk to society (e.g. disruption to space technology and communication) and given recent advances in observation, forecasting has become possible and important to government and industry. Recently the Met Office have begun forecasts based on realtime manual inspection of images. The data is difficult to interpret due to the line of sight problem: 2-D images of a 3-D system. This proposal describes work that uses novel image processing and analysis techniques to extract useful 3-D information from the remote sensing data – including crosscalibration[1], tomography[2], CME detection[3,4,5], and image processing[6]. Our aim is to provide the research and industrial communities with useful realtime output based on automated routines.